Takis referred me to a Google tech talk about git by Linus Torvalds.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8]
Although I am more of a bzr advocate (for one because it’s easier to use, and fast enough for me), he gives a good explanation for the need for distributed revision control (which both bzr and git belong to).
Well worth a look.
I just released version 0.1 of PydgetRFID, the Python interface to the Phidgets Inc. RFID kit I blogged about earlier. It’s free software (licensed under the GPL). It wraps libphidgets with ctypes to talk to the hardware.
The software is now more polished and additionally provides a D-Bus service that allows other applications (written in any language with D-Bus bindings) to use the hardware. Currently this means you can connect to the hardware from Python, Ruby, .NET, C, C++, Perl and Pascal!
This DBUS service allows to start and stop reading, and emits a signal whenever a different tag (including the nil value) is read. I modified the original PyGTK GUI to use this daemon for communicating with the hardware. Furthermore, I improved the HAL support so that plugging the device in and out is detected. Unfortunately, the daemon cannot yet handle this though. That’s for a next release
Here is the GUI (which you probably remember from the last post). Nil values are now colored red:
And this a screenshot showing the communication between the daemon and the GUI logged with dbus-monitor:
More information can be found at the PydgetRFID homepage.
I meant to blog about this for some time now
First some background information: second year computer science students at our university are supposed to do a big project to enhance their programming skills and ability to work in teams. The students can suggest a project themselves, or choose a predefined one from a list provided by the teaching staff.
Around January, I submitted a proposal to write a YAML parser for .NET. There were a couple of YAML parsers available, but none for .NET. A secondary goal was to release the final product under an open source license.
Jonathan Slenders and Christophe Lambrechts chose to do the project. Under the guidance of Tom Van Laerhoven, they produced a working YAML parser, and released it under the LGPL. It was mentioned on the YAML homepage in June. Since then they have received quite some mails from people interested in using their library.
The project will soon be placed on SourceForge. Until then, more information (including a description of the parser’s algorithm and documentation) can be found at http://lumumba.uhasselt.be/~christophe/YAML/.
The code is available through CVS.
Edit: the project is now available on Sourceforge.